In 2015, I was asked to design the packaging for the rapper Egreen’s upcoming LP, in collaboration with award winning photographer Sha Ribeiro.

Egreen had the idea of doing something non strictly “rap looking”, since the gritty and uncompromising style of the music, and the powerful impact of his vocal style, sounded more like a metal record than a traditional rap one. He wanted something though and resilient on the cover, hence the choice of using the ridged shell of the alligator tortoise as a cover, mirrored with an unexploded WWII hand grenade found in Milan.Sha found an embalmed specimen of the tortoise in Milan’s natural history museum, and created the powerful cover shot.

Around it I created a narration based of Egreen’s personality, his aggressive yet thoughtful attitude. The stripped back and minimalistic approach of the typography allows Ribeiro’s powerful shots to shine and tell the story, while working as a sort of footnotes to the project.

The album was funded via crowdfunding, and as a reward for the backers, Egreen wanted to create something exclusive and unique. Since the project reached over 300% of his goal, we produced a box set including a digipak printed on metal foiled paper, with raised ink, a booklet printed using black ink plus two additional Pantone ink (a heavy black and a deep grey) and a matte black cd with a uv spot ink.